Library Transcripts

Video Link: https://youtu.be/xfoqiDCKxdI

 

 

Begin Transcript

 

 

Narration:

 

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>>       TRACI AVET HECTOR:  Here are our objectives for today's webinar, the four things we really want you to leave the session with.  Our goal is that you will be able to understand the course readings process.  Identify course readings and multimedia that comes from the library.  Knowing your options for accessing course materials begin to understand what to do when something is broken.  We do not like when that happens, but it really helps if you know the next steps to take.

 

Let's start with, what are we talking about when we talk about a course reading?  We are not talking about a course textbook -- or those materials you are required to purchase.  So for every course you take it Walden, your syllabus, located in Blackboard, will tell you  what textbook or textbooks that students taking that course will need to buy.  Unfortunately the library is not usually able to get the textbooks, and you have to read at least portions of your textbook at different points during your course.

 

When we are talking about course readings, we are not on about those portions you have to read from your textbooks.  And most of your courses you have this additional list of materials your instructors want you to explore.  This additional list of materials they feel will contribute to your understanding of the coursework.  Or maybe some important aspect of your field at large.  And that additional list of stuff that you are also expected to look at in addition to your textbooks, is what we are talking about when we talk about course readings.

 

Here is what happens in the process.  We begin with the course developers. A team of course developers form a list of resources  that they think all students taking fat courses should be required to look at, so articles or reports they want you to read, videos they might want you to watch.  Sometimes it is even a chart or document they think will directly benefit you as a student taking the course.

 

These are not suggestions for learning but works you are required to explore to prepare yourself for the point in your course or for the next point coming up.

 

But many of those things are available through the library.  For example, many of these works they want you to read your articles published in academic journals.  Even a handful of articles published in newspapers but most academic libraries subscribe to databases that have a lot of those Journal and newspaper articles.  Many even some of those videos.  So when those course developers have finalized that list of additional resources, the library will sneak in and see if any of those readings or videos from that list are things that we have.

 

We will take those things that we have access to that we can offer students to the library, and find those things that would take a student directly to that resource.   We will put those links together to form a course guide the for that course, a course guide that lets you, the student in the course, access those materials.  Without having to buy them.  We get them to you through the library whenever that is possible.

 

What we see here is a comparison of those things available through the library.  And in those things that are not.  We really need to start out by pointing something out that may seem off-topic.  But it is a pretty important point for you to remember.

 

The only required course materials you should be paying for our year textbooks.  Or whatever is listed as a course text under the course material section of your syllabus.  All other required materials, whether articles, videos, reports, charts or some other document, will either be available through the library or through Blackboard -- or the instructions through access to Blackboard.

 

Resources available to the library, they will have some sort of reference to the library.  So something like, you will access this article from the Walden Library databases...  Or retrieved from the Walden library.

 

What is not available to the library -- okay, resources considered textbooks.  We just talked about that.  But also those resources produced by Walden University education or Walden University media, you have videos you may have seen that have that in the resource details.  Most optional readings that are listed are things that we usually do not have access to.

 

The not in library list also includes resources that are linked in or available through Blackboard.  So that can be anything like Microsoft Word documents to linked webpages, even articles out there that can only be purchased at the classroom level, they cannot be bought at the library level so only available through Blackboard.  But you want to the library mentioned in the citations or the resource details for any of those materials.

 

To get to the course readings, that course readings list, the course guide that the library puts together, and access your course materials, you have a couple of options.  You have from the library homepage, you can click on the big course guides box located on the right-hand side of the website.  And in Blackboard, you can often find that in your syllabus or in -- depending how your course is set up -- your weeks or modules.  So, each week or module may have a resource or resource list, a tab or link, that will give you a list of those additional materials that the course developers, the instructors, want you to take a look at.

 

What we are going to do, I'm going to get out of power point and I went to show you this life.  We are at the library homepage.  The easy way to get here, library.Waldenu.edu, and we can click on course guides in the upper right and you can do this for every course that you take.  Not every course as a guide, but it is worth checking just to see if yours has that because you will have access to those materials.  So if I were taking psychology 3005, I can scroll down, click on the first letter for the letter P, and on the four letter code for the course, and then find my number.

 

By doing that, I will just click on this one -- I see a list of the materials available through the library.  This will not have the extra non-library resources that may be linked in Blackboard -- but it will have those things available through the library.  And so we can click here, I am going to open a new tab -- and then we will be able to access that resource right from the links available to you in that course guide.

 

You can see that is the full article.  You progress one thing I want to point out, this Mystery session is about course readings, but we want to point out that there is also assignment guides available in select course guides.  So if we click on "week five discussion" link on the left, this gives us step-by-step instructions for accomplishing that discussion post or that weekly assignment, whatever might have a guide for that course.

 

Let's take a quick look in Blackboard how this might look.  I am enrolled here in the EDUC, the education 6616 course.  Under this section you will see what it considers it to be your course texts.  Any items you need to purchase will be listed here.  There may be notes here that you should have purchases for previous course.  Pay attention to any of that because there will be cases where you have already had to get it and so it might be in your vital source bookshelf.

 

Below that, you will see the course readings list.  This is a link to the course guide.  So I can click on this and be taken to the course guide for that course.  You will notice actually has a link to the article, and there is only one in this one.  We have a few assignment guides.

 

Now, this is actually going to be shown in the weekly or the modules sections of the course as well.  Let's say -- let's go back to the main page, and instead of going through the syllabus, let's just say we were in module three.  Now, resources or resource list, if you go into the sections, you will see those additional materials or the library materials -- whatever you are supposed to explore during that week -- and we can see that the says, Jensen, How poverty affects classroom engagement, this article here.  So we can come to this guide and access the full text right from that page.

 

I am going to switch this over to Julie now.

 

>>      JULIE JAMES:  Thank you, Traci. I want to show you something that took me a little bit of time to figure out.  This may have been obvious to you but it was not to me.  In Blackboard, some of the links have this blue arrow on them and some are not links.  It took me a while to realize that I should stop clicking on the ones that do not have the blue arrow.  So I thought that might be helpful if somebody else was having the same problem.  To just know whether the article will be linked in the classroom or not -- that blue arrow.

 

Your examples were great.  There were so many types of materials there.  One of the things that I really like about Walden is how they are constantly refreshing these lists, putting newer items on there and all of that.  But everything does not always work perfectly, unfortunately.  What happens when the link does not work? and that can be for a number of reasons.  Sometimes the publishers will change their access for us  without giving us notice on that and it is as surprising to us as it is to you that we cannot get to that link.

 

Sometimes it is just a browser issue.  And so I put that is number one, because if you get a blank screen or error message when you click a link that should be going to full text, try and alternate browser.  We have noticed that a lot in the last year or two that the browser seemed to get gummed up a lot more than they used to.  And after you've been searching for something for an hour it starts to get confusing so if you use Chrome as your primary, Firefox is an excellent backup.  If you have IE or Safari you should have something as an alternate and try it next time you hit a dead end that is blank, and quite frequently it will work.

 

My number two tip for when the link is broken is to check Google Scholar, that is surprisingly easy if you have a link from Walden library to Google scholar you can search the title of the article in Google scholar and you can see if we have a Walden link to it.  Sometimes it will find the link through a cross database search, just because the system has backups.  We get the same journals from a couple of different sources, and depending on the article that you are looking for, we may be able to find it from a different source.

 

The number three tip, is to ask for help.  Because frequently we do not know the link is broken until a student reports it.  But for the library links, we can fix those immediately if it is available in another database.  And the rest of the class can have it conveniently located.  And then if we have lost access to that particular article, we can see if we can purchase it -- there are a number of ways we can try to fix it, but frequently it is the student that tells us they are not working.  So please do report them.

 

You can report Blackboard issues to "student support" from within Blackboard.  And that really helps because they can tell exactly where you were clicking from.

 

If it is on the library website, "ask a librarian"  is your best bet and it is helpful if you can copy and paste, not just the citation but tell us what the course code is and what week it is.  Sometimes it takes a long time to find the references so that we can correct them and make them work for everybody else.

 

Okay.  We have a question.  Oh we have a question about what happens if you still cannot find resources?  I think the question came in before I started talking about that.  But when you cannot find the resources from the course, that would be when you go back to our one, two, three, try in an alternate browser.  If that could possibly be the issue.  The Google Scholar tip, you can go to this link from the handouts or you can find it just on our website.  From our library website here, we have a number of links up here under "start your research" but we have the Google Scholar link from here and it has the instructions for linking Google Scholar.

 

But most often, "get help" is useful for the get help page is one of the best pages on our website, because it has so many different ways of resolving the problem.   If you think it could be a browser issue but you're not sure how to fix it exactly, we have browser settings in here.  We have instructions on clearing your cache, that can be useful. We have different settings if you -- have tinkered with the settings or if you are using a computer at your  workplace or school, these browsers will typically work straight out of the gate for most resources.  But if you are having trouble with a lot of different resources, that may be something to look at.

 

Other things that are on our, get help, page are the local library skills guides".  If you  are lost and need the help on particular things, these are short to the point and can really be helpful.

 

Tutorials, step-by-stepways of looking at things.  And then the recorded webinars.  Like the one we are doing right now.  You can look at our previous Mysteries webinars, under the recorded webinars for library skills.  And you can make an investment in time by watching some of these at the beginning of your coursework, and then it will go a lot more smoothly in the long run.

 

The last thing I would like to show you -- two things I would like to show you on the get help page -- the "quick answers" is very helpful.  If you know there is something on the library website but you cannot find it -- which is quite frequently where I am -- I use this quick answers every day to find these things begin it is not just library stuff.  Have academic skill center items, writing center items, things like that, in the quick answers.

 

And then "ask a librarian".  We have four different ways you can ask a librarian.  Email is the most efficient, because you can copy and paste the citation intercourse information in here.  And you have different shifts in the day.  It says we typically respond to your question 24 hours but it is usually more quickly than that.

 

If you scroll down to the chat, it tells you we have chat hours open right now.  These are in Eastern time.  Twice a day and once on Tuesdays.  If the chat live button says chat live, then you can pop right in and chat with us for quick questions.  We cannot really do some involve literature reviews through chat, but we can answer quick questions pretty easily.

 

The phone goes to voicemail.  And we generally cannot give you a call back we respond by email.  I just wanted to let you know that, because we do get folks leaving a message that expected call back but that is really just not feasible with the number of students that we have.

 

If you are a doctoral student, you can make a doctoral research appointment with a subject specialist here.

 

All of these other ways are helpful-- ways we can help you get to the course readings if something has gone wrong. 

 

Do we have any questions for helping you come out questions about getting to your readings?  What other questions do you have?

 

>>       TRACI AVET HECTOR:  I don't see any questions so far.

 

>>      JULIE JAMES:  This is a quiet a bunch.

 

>>       TRACI AVET HECTOR:  It sure is.

 

>>      JULIE JAMES:  Is everything good there?  Let's see, I see somebody has a hand raised, but turning microphones on for this many people is difficult.  Can you type your question in the question box?

 

Maybe we answer the question for the hand raised.

 

>>       TRACI AVET HECTOR:  If you are like us, and you think about your question like after the webinar is over, then just ask a librarian, remember what Julie just showed you.  The page we are looking at, and you will get help.

 

>>      JULIE JAMES:  And the email, really sometimes we get that back to you in just a few minutes, so don't feel like you cannot reach out to us for anything by email.  If we do not know the answer we can probably find out for you.

 

>>       TRACI AVET HECTOR:  Someone is asking one question, how do I get to the course guide?

 

>>      JULIE JAMES:  Oh, to the course guide.  I find the easiest way to get to the library homepage is just typing, library.Waldenu.edu, and that will redirect all that academic guides business.  This is the library homepage and the big blue "course guides" button is here pixie go to the course guides button, and then you go by the code on your course.  So if I am in the nursing course, I would go to NURS, and they are in numerical order here and that is how you get to your course guide.

 

If you do not have a course guide for your course, then we have not been told that you have any readings that are located in the library.  If you are supposed to have a course guide and you do not, that would be a good time to ask a librarian.  And go to library help and ask a librarian.

 

>>       TRACI AVET HECTOR:  Okay -- we do have a question, Please show me again how to get to Google Scholar?

 

>>      JULIE JAMES:  Ah, Google Skull has become useful these days.  We have a special link under "start your research" to Google Scholar.  The reason you would use this link is because it is coded to Walden library holdings.

 

So if you find an article citation and  you have recognize and linked up -- you either do it through this boxer or you have linked up your Google Scholar to Walden library, it will show the "find at Walden" links to the right of the citations.  If you are a regular user of Google scholar like I am and you put a Google Scholar button on your toolbar,can link that to Walden library, to find the "find at Walden" links there as well.

 

If you are searching for a known item in Google Scholar, and that is really what I use it for because I don't think it is a great job of discovering things, specific work, if you are looking for a known item, though, put in the title of the article only, into Google scholar.  If you put the whole citation with the authors and publication dates and all of that, it gets confused.  But it will usually match the title exactly.

 

What other questions do you have?

 

>>       TRACI AVET HECTOR:  I do not see any more in the questions pane. A couple of thank yous.

 

>>      JULIE JAMES:  Well, you are very welcome and I hope this was helpful to you.  And if you have any other suggestions on short sessions like this that we can do to help you unravel the Mysteries of the Library, please put them in the survey that you will get after the webinar has ended

 

>>       TRACI AVET HECTOR:  Yes and be specific, if there is something you find yourself just a little bit lost about or find yourself having to refigure out over and over, please let us know because we want to tackle those things that would be most helpful.

 

>>      JULIE JAMES:  And we are here to help you succeed, so let us know how we can do that.

 

Thanks everyone, good night.

 

>>       TRACI AVET HECTOR:  Thank you.

 

 

End Transcript

 

Created by Walden University Library